I sometimes read other people's columns and I usually regret it before I even finish reading.

As I read them, I often think, "Why don't I come up with as many of those bright ideas? I could have written something just like that had I thought of it."

Well, I'm not going to let other people's creativity bog me down and keep me from achieving my full potential, even if that falls far short of the Dave Barry and Lewis Grizzard standard.

Years ago I used to typeset Lewis Grizzard columns for a newspaper. I would sometimes spend hours typing his work and sometimes laughing out loud as I did it. He was witty, interesting, well-spoken and distinctly Southern. He's also dead.

I think that's the best way to be considered a great writer or artist. Anyone who's still living can always change, improve or otherwise continue to pump out less-than-extraordinary work. Those who are dead can be neatly catalogued and their works separated out into books with titles like "The Best of...." or "The 25 Greatest Columns."

In looking back at my own ‘legacy' of columns, I must honestly admit that not very much truly stands out. There aren't many great works, no Sistine Chapels or Mona Lisa's, not even one reaching the standard of an O. Henry classic comes to mind. He's also dead.

I just finished reading the last story of a compilation of O. Henry short stories. The man, a native of North Carolina, was quite a writer. I even had to get out my dictionary a few times to figure out what some of the words meant, which I seldom find myself doing. His eloquence and manner of speaking were poetic in ways, but also sometimes confusing without full concentration. Like so many writers, he could easily write my mind into a mental knot.

Since most of his works in this little paperback were from around 1910 or so, there are occasions when the point of view is a bit skewed from our perspective. In more than one, someone is searching for a lost love who left the city to go to the country and was scheduled to return.

These people obviously didn't have e-mail, cell phones or even telephones, in most cases. They lived in cities and didn't own cars or trucks and several stories talk about horse-drawn carriages piloted by much-disparaged ‘freedmen' in towns like Nashville, Tenn. The racist views weren't particularly sharp in O. Henry, but it was apparent that he was a child of the segregated South. That difference alone would make big differences in the way everyone had to live their daily life, but those who weren't born caucasian would have seen the biggest changes.

Everyone faced early deaths to diseases like mumps, rubella and even pneumonia and sometimes were stricken with polio. The food and water weren't always safe and sometimes meals were hard to come by. Stories of ‘bums' and people who lived by their wits were also common, with some turning to lives as thugs and others just happy to get by on their wits.

Our standard of living today would have been reserved only for the very wealthy. Only they would have had the means to load down their tables every day with meats, vegetables, breads, milk and butter.

The average person's diet wouldn't have been very varied, with even simple things like sugar and coffee seen as luxuries. The average life span was somewhere around 50 years and there were no televisions, radios or other communications devices. However, their personal communications skills no doubt were far more developed than ours. When's the last time you sat on the porch and talked with your neighbors for hours? When did you last write a multi-page letter to someone in your own handwriting? I can barely remember the last letter that I sat down and actually wrote out. In fact, I don't remember the last one. I do remember writing a few.

When I was young, I can still remember how people were much more impressed to receive a typewritten letter than a handwritten one. One of the first things I bought when I got some extra money was a typewriter, followed by an early personal computer, followed by a new and better model every five years or so since then.

The pen and the ink now sit long forgotten on the desktop, vestiges of days long gone.

Oh, I still take notes by hand, scrawling them out in my ‘code language' that I developed as a beginning reporter about two decades ago, but I certainly wouldn't call that chicken scratch writing.

Then again, my penmanship was never the stuff of legend, unless you consider that the subjects of some legends are notorious rather than famous.

Typewriters were vehicles for people like me to share their knowledge without having to read it for the recipient. But I could print very well, thank you very much.

For entertainment, people had to leave their homes and go places or spend time reading a novel (or a really good short story). I suppose that's why there were so many great writers: They had the practice, the time and the means to do little more. After all, not many folks were publishing blogs at that time.

Most of the folks wrote letters back and forth with their families. Lacking Interstate highways, automobiles and airplanes, they had to take trips by train, wagon, horse, mule or on foot. There probably was no good way to get from here to there, so most people had a community in which they lived and they stayed there.

In that case and for that reason, neighbors would have been more than just adjoining land owners, they would have been a support system, a network and cohorts. Such a sense of community as our forefathers had likely will not be seen again in our culture unless the hands of time are somehow cranked back a few hundred years in some unforeseen cataclysm.

So, other than yelling across the way, the communication was limited to face-to-face or pen and ink. If someone were to be forced to move away unexpectedly, even a loved one or family member, they could easily be lost one from another from then on.

In big cities like New York, the backdrop from whence O. Henry penned most of his works, such stories were commonplace in these little stories, of lost loves seeking out their heart's desire, of women and men waiting at set meeting places for a tryst or rendezvous that might have been set days, weeks, months or even years in advance.

One thing's for sure, those people probably had a much more highly developed sense of patience and maturity than we have today.
 

Get the whole story - read this week's edition of The Alleghany News!